


A World Flipped Upside Down

by AnneShirleyCuthbert



Category: A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
Genre: Book: A Wrinkle In Time, F/M, Post-A Wrinkle in Time, because she deserves it, kate murry character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 10:28:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16239767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnneShirleyCuthbert/pseuds/AnneShirleyCuthbert
Summary: Alex came home, and Kate’s world flipped upside down for the third time.





	A World Flipped Upside Down

**Author's Note:**

> A deeper, well-deserved look into the life and times of Kate Murry; exists somewhere between book canon and movie canon.

Alex came home, and Kate’s world flipped upside down for the third time.

The first time her life changed wholly, completely, was back in grade school, when her Aunt Kelly, who was really more like Kate’s mother due to the alcohol-infused absence of her own parents, died sick and sudden after a particularly violent bout of the flu swept into town. 

For most people, this flu was a mild inconvenience. However, as Aunt Kelly (and Uncle Dave, and their daughter Izzy, and Kate herself) had not received any vaccines that year—or any year, in fact, due to some pretty out-there beliefs linking vaccinations and government mind control—she never got better. Up until that point, Kate had never questioned Aunt Kelly and Uncle Dave’s thoughts on vaccinations—she didn’t like needles, and enjoyed the fact that she could brag to everyone at school that _she_ didn’t need to get a shot, inspiring no little green-eyed jealousy amongst her peers—but after Kelly died in a dehydrated stupor, too afraid of doctors and their supposedly nefarious ways to go to the hospital until it was too late, Kate began to believe in the power of vaccines. The miracles of medicine, idly and then obsessively researched during the empty hours between two and four in the morning when the grief over her aunt became too much to sleep, acted as Kate’s gateway into the larger world of science. While at first she researched just to torture herself with the many, many ways her aunt could have maybe survived the flu strain that year, her curiosity soon expanded and led her to the fields of not just biological medicine but chemistry, environmental science, and physics. But it was microbiology—everything so small! So secret! So ready for a big break, a sudden “Aha!” moment—that ended up being her first true love. Microbiology was what she wrote about in her college application essays, was what she daydreamed about in English class, and, after she ended up at a top-rate university on a full scholarship in exchange for lab research, was the way in which she came head-to-head with what would become the second cataclysmic, world-bending change in her life.

That change’s name was Alex Murry. 

“Head-to-head” was a good phrase to use when describing the way Kate and Alex met. She was his tutor, a year ahead in school but the same age as her charge due to Alex being suspended from his high school for a semester after a (not entirely innocent) mistake in the school’s AP Chemistry lab that resulted in a melted lab hood, some singed eyebrows, and flooding throughout the school’s entire third floor. He was cute; all long fingers and open smiles and messy brown hair that he wore just slightly longer than most of the boys on campus, making him the target of many dreamy stares from girls who wanted someone more sensitive than their jock boyfriends. Kate was most definitely not immune to his charm, but she was also wildly professional, not letting their relationship develop past the point of a cordial friendship until he strode over to her usual study corner in the library just before the end of the first semester, announced that he had (somehow, someway) passed his microbiology final and should they go get some dinner to celebrate? She said yes, they ended up being best friends for two months, and then they made the glorious mistake of sneaking cheap beer into the university planetarium after hours, a move which led to an accidental confession of love between swigs of Keystone Light (“God, I think I’m in love with you.” “Don’t say things you don’t mean, Kate.” “I’m serious. Wait. Fuck, I shouldn’t’ve—“ “Kate? That’s not the beer talking?” “No. Of course not. I’ve just had one.” “ _Thank God._ ”) The rest soon followed, and before long the two of them were in doctorate programs at different schools but still decidedly coupled, their date nights made up of weekly love letters and phone sex and, when time allowed, visits to one campus or the other in order to send a precious weekend together. They were separate organisms, allowed to flourish and grow within their own spaces, but still unequivocally tied together in a way that left no one surprised when they announced their engagement just a year after moving in together post grad school. Their careers and their kids soon followed, the trials of the workplace and parenthood leading to all kinds of failures and successes; Kate was incredibly, incandescently happy. 

It was then that her world flipped for the second time.

Alex disappeared.

The first twenty-four hours after his disappearance crystalized in her mind as being completely numb. There was no sense of hope, but also no sense of doom. Alex was simply gone, vanished, and she was trying to find him the same way she tried to find the solution to a problem in her lab. One day turned into two, then five, then three weeks had passed and the police decided that he must have ran off with some other woman (“Well, is anyone surprised?” the neighbors whispered, “Marrying some workaholic girl like her? She must be made of ice if she’s happy _leaving_ her kids behind for half the week just to go stare at some cell tissue. And for what? It’s not like they need the money! He made plenty for the both of them at NASA!”). Kate continued to search for her husband, desperate for any sign of his whereabouts. She scrutinized the classified ads in the daily newspaper, looking for secret communiques; she stalked her way through nearby towns, hunting for a forgotten bread-crumb of a button to match those sewn onto his winter coat; she dropped the kids off at her mother-in-law’s—her mother-in-law, who blamed Kate just a little for Alex’s disappearance, though that resentment mostly came from the fact she was more than a little racist, not because she really though Kate had anything to do with Alex being gone—in order to field tip-line phone calls that came in strong at first but, eventually, dwindled down to nothing. She kept it together while caring for the kids, ever the fountain of strength, but had to duck into the bathroom at work to cry more than once because she had heard a joke or made a small scientific discovery or just craved being held close, all experiences she wanted to share with her missing husband. While she eventually found stability, a tenuous way to keep all the plates—motherhood, work, a semblance of a social life, not dating, never dating—spinning, the ache of Alex’s disappearance never really went away. The pain was just made microscopic, too small to see with the naked eye but still there to be discovered by Kate whenever she cared to take a peek.

But when Alex came home, and Kate’s world flipped upside down for the third time, she didn’t think about any of this. She didn’t think about all the hurt she had stored up in the marrow of her bones, the ways in which she had suffered. She didn’t think about her mother-in-law demanding, drunk one night after a “family” dinner, that Kate tell her where Alex’s body was; she didn’t think about having to reckon, all alone, with Meg’s temper and Charles Wallace’s eccentricities and the twins’ continuous trouble with taking pranks just a tad too far. She didn’t even think about her life with Alex before his disappearance: how they had their first official date at the local chess club’s “couple’s night” because they wanted to do something neither of them had ever tried before, how he always brewed her coffee extra-strong in the morning, how she could match him, shot for shot, whenever they went out drinking with friends, how he kissed a line down and across her clavicle when they made love but bit into her shoulder— _don’t stop Alex, oh God, yes!—_ when they fucked. In fact, she had only two thoughts on her mind when her long-lost husband and her beautiful children and the neighbor boy (what was his name, again?) stumbled into the backyard of her home— _their_ home—one cloudless, chaotic night.

Those two thoughts were as follows:

1\. Are the kids alright?

2\. A feeling, a nameless, indescribable relief and joy and ache and curiosity—always curiosity, that’s what had set her on this path with him, after all—because Alex was _home_.

Alex was home, they were all alright, and for the third time, Kate Murry’s life had flipped totally upside down. Only this time, the tears falling from her eyes and tracing her cheeks as she ran toward the people she loved most in the world were not tears of pain, but of pure, unadulterated joy.

 


End file.
